The Open Road

The next time you feel tempted to laud the power of the open-source business model, take a look at Novell.

Novell has been struggling for over 10 years, yet it still manages to crank out nearly $1 billion in sales each year, most of which derives from the licensing of proprietary software.

Novell reported its fourth-quarter earnings on Thursday, along with results from its full fiscal year. They're not pretty, but they do suggest a path forward for the erstwhile software leader.

Novell saw its sales slump over 12 percent from its year-ago quarter to $216 million. For the full fiscal year, Novell stumbled to a $257 million net loss, versus a $5 million profit in 2008, on net revenue of $862 million and a net loss from operations of $206 million.

Perhaps not for long.

Much of that annual deficit came in the fourth quarter, which included a $279 million noncash impairment charge that sent Novell's quarter into the red by $259 million.

Not pretty.

Unless you look at Novell's Linux numbers. Linux remains Novell's most appealing business and was up 21 percent year over year to $149 million--and up 14 percent at $39 in in its fourth quarter over the year-ago period. While a far cry from Red Hat's booming Linux business, Novell's results suggest that there's life in its Linux business yet.

Life that Microsoft continues to seem content to grant.

Make no mistake, without Microsoft, Novell's Linux business would struggle, at least in the short term. Microsoft, after all, has been funding Novell's Linux business since 2006, when the two companies entered into an interoperability and Suse Linux subsidy pact.

And without its Linux business, all of the rest of Novell's business would be in jeopardy, as Suse Linux makes Novell's other products a palatable choice. Even so Novell's Identity and Security Management, Systems and Resource Management, and Workgroup businesses all dropped significantly (down 10 percent, 6 percent, and 13 percent, respectively).

Novell's needs
Clearly, Novell needs Linux. Equally clearly, it needs Microsoft to grow that Linux business. Microsoft has already plowed $247.5 million into Suse Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) subscription coupons, and Novell CEO Ron Hovsepian has indicated he's now dipping into the additional $100 million in coupons the companies negotiated.

But how can Novell accelerate its Linux business at a pace that will be comfortable for Microsoft, which has made no secret of its animus to Linux and desire to quash it? Microsoft partners with Novell to show a good interoperability face to its customers who use Linux and to prop up the No. 2 vendor against Red Hat, the dominant Linux vendor.

The day that Novell's Suse Linux business threatens Microsoft, and not merely undermines Red Hat, is the day Microsoft will pull its extensive financial support from Novell's Linux business. That same day Novell's Linux business will crumble, perhaps irreparably.

Unless.

Unless Novell can deliver a coherent strategy centered on Linux rather than merely friendly to Linux. For years Novell has packaged and repackaged a set of mostly stale offerings (e.g., Workgroup), pretending that they were part of a coherent strategy.

They weren't. The company was simply milking maintenance revenues as it sought to find a way forward. (I was in those meetings back in 2002 when the company discussed how to stanch the bleeding from maintenance declines. Those same conversations continue today, I'm sure.)

Then, as now, Novell's various product lines, and particularly Workgroup, offered little synergy, either in sales or engineering (i.e., the buyer of GroupWise is not the same as the buyer of Suse is generally not the same as the buyer of Identity Management).

Ongoing makeover
Novell is now entering a new phase of its repackaging makeover, but this one actually makes some sense. The company is calling it Intelligent Workload Management, arguing that a "new market [exists] for solutions that address the risks and challenges for computing securely across multiple environments."

Not surprisingly, Hovsepian argues that such an Intelligent Workload Management market "plays to the strengths of Novell--identity and security, systems and resource management, and our new Suse Appliance program."

Surprisingly, he may be right.

First of all, its wonderful to see Workgroup dropped from the discussion. Yes, it's Novell's biggest product by revenue, but no, it has almost no relevance for the rest of its business. Sell it off. Move on. The company has already offloaded much of its Workgroup development to India, anyway.

Second, Novell really does have a great deal of expertise in this area, with some assets that could go a long way toward helping it compete with the vendors that compete aggressively in the market: VMware, Microsoft, and increasingly Red Hat.

The key will be for Novell to really put Linux at the heart of its story, rather than simply using it as a conversation starter and loss-leader.

And yet, more is needed. Novell has the burden of a stale brand that it must shed. A few select acquisitions could help it to establish technology and brand leadership in the market. Companies like Reductive Labs (Puppet project for data center infrastructure management), VMOps or Eucalyptus (for building and managing private clouds), and/or Cloudera (for designing and analyzing large-scale data assets) could put Novell in the driver's seat on this market.

For the first time in years, the market seems to have moved in a direction that corresponds with Novell's rich technology assets. If Novell can make Linux the centerpiece of this campaign, bolstered by relevant, innovative technology, it will finally get its Linux business out of Microsoft's shadow and its overall business back on track.

The technology pieces are in place. It's now a question of brand and execution.

Google's biggest threat is no longer Microsoft. It is itself.

As the company harvests copious quantities of personal data, it becomes dramatically better at serving customer needs...

...and at freaking them out over privacy concerns.

In other words, Google gets stronger with every Google Doc created, every Google Voice call dialed, and every Gmail e-mail sent. It becomes stronger because data is the heart of the Web's biggest businesses, as Redmonk analyst Stephen O'Grady implies.

But in so doing Google also becomes more threatening to the very consumers it is trying to serve.

Google Dashboard is meant to change this by putting consumer data back in the hands of consumers. It's a move that follows on Google's earlier pledge to "open data" and its Data Liberation Front.

As CNET reports, Dashboard lets people review the personal data Google has stored for them, delete it, and alter future collection policies. It's a great way for Google to mollify concerned users, putting control back in their hands.

Still, it's almost certainly never going to be used by the vast majority of Google users. Ever.

Why? Because for all our hand-wringing over privacy--and for good reason--the reality is that most of us, most of the time, really don't care. Or, rather, if accessing useful services or getting work done more efficiently requires some privacy concessions, we gladly concede.

It's not that we don't value our privacy. It's just that in many contexts, we value other things as much or more. We weigh the risks versus the benefits, and often the benefits trump the privacy risks.

It's the same thing with file formats. For years we've been agonizing over Microsoft's lock-in of customers through proprietary file formats (.pst, .doc, etc.). Now Microsoft is opening up the specifications for file formats like .pst (Outlook file format), and yet it will almost certainly change little to nothing in what products most people use most of the time.

People don't use Microsoft Office because they're forced to. They do so because it's convenient. (Yes, an argument can be made that it's convenient because Microsoft has forced network effects through lock-in.)

This, incidentally, is exactly the reason that Wednesday night I declared a ban on Microsoft Office in our family in favor of Google Docs--and didn't opt for OpenOffice (which we also use). I got sick of having to recover documents and perform other IT tasks related to a locally installed office suite, open source or proprietary. And I find it easier to let Google handle the back-end IT operations.

I wasn't trying to evade lock-in. I was trying to increase personal happiness.

Am I concerned about Google snooping on the documents we write and store in Google Docs? Let's just say I worry more about my time fixing Office than whether Google gleans any information from my 12-year old's seventh-grade essay.

Dashboard leaves Google in the prime position of being able to honestly say that it doesn't control user data, while still delivering increasingly beneficial services based on that data. It will not change the way that the vast majority of consumers use Google, but it just might change the way they think about Google.

A very smart move by Google, one that all data-driven businesses should emulate.

Follow me on Twitter @mjasay.

Some of us take longer than others. Tim O'Reilly moved on years ago from talking about open-source licenses and instead focused on the importance of data to business success. In the open-source industry, we heard his words but clearly didn't understand them.

We kept selling software through our "awkward teenage years," even as Google, 37Signals, Facebook, and others gave it away.

Years later, as Google pays for mountains of open-source code by aggregating data and selling data-rich services, we're starting to grok O'Reilly's message. It's what makes companies like Path Intelligence so interesting.

Redmonk's Stephen O'Grady notes:

Much has been made of the lack of an obvious revenue model for properties like Twitter, and to a lesser extent, Facebook. But when looking at the organizations' balance sheets...it seems self-evident that the value of the data assets involved is seriously underreported...

The economic value being assigned to data helps to explain why, while being sympathetic to questions about Twitter business models, I've never been overwhelmingly concerned. Where the revenue model for the dot-com era "eyeballs" strategy was equal parts indistinct and aspirational, the Web 2.0 businesses are being built out in an era of customers increasingly predisposed to analytics and data driven decision making. In other words, there's a market for their most valuable asset.

As Microsoft's Windows, Office, Xbox, and SharePoint businesses demonstrate, the real money is in the platform business, which is, or which can be, a data business. The more businesses and developers that build upon your software, the more valuable that software becomes. Even systems like Twitter are being turned into platforms.

But how you build the platform is increasingly important. Microsoft is Platform 1.0. Open source is Platform 2.0. It's a more efficient way to build community around a core, which is why Google and other savvy companies increasingly turn to open source as a fundamental way to entice developers, which developers create more software which invites more adoption which yields more data...you get the picture.

It's also why I believe Google Android, in its platform battle with Apple's iPhone, will ultimately prevail, so long as it can work in peaceful coexistence with the developer community (which has not always been the case).

Unlike many open-source companies, however, Google et al. have the singular benefit that since their business is data, not software, they can shepherd open-source development without taking a heavy hand in community management. More open source leads to more adoption, which leads to more data, which leads to the Googles of the world being able to give away even more software for "less than free."

It's genius. And it's amazing that it took so many of us so long to heed the counsel O'Reilly offered years ago.

In sum, this isn't a suggestion that companies should forgo profits in exchange for mindless popularity contests, as 37Signals' Jason Fried rightly pillories.

Instead, it's a call to look for ways to fund open-source development with rich, data-driven businesses. Most open-source companies focus too much on software, and most Web 2.0 companies focus too much on data. It's the blend of the two that makes a company successful.

Just ask Google.

(As an end note, I think Gartner's Brian Prentice is on to something when he speculates that enterprise applications may increasingly be communally developed by IT end users, though perhaps coordinated by vendors. It's a very interesting prospect, one that will enable even more open-source development in an area where data may not fund it.)

Oracle is determined to keep MySQL if it acquires Sun, but the reason likely has little to do with open source and everything to do with Microsoft. Oracle doesn't compete with open source. Not really. Open source is simply a means to an end, and in the case of MySQL, a means to denting Microsoft's rising strength in emerging markets where Oracle's expensive database technology doesn't resonate.

Oracle CEO Larry Ellison has said that he has no intention of spinning off MySQL to win EU approval of Oracle's bid for Sun. This isn't because Ellison has a soft spot for open source, but rather because MySQL helps Oracle compete in markets--like Web applications, small- to medium-sized businesses (SMBs), and emerging markets--where its existing database technology doesn't compete well, but in which Microsoft's SQL Server does.

In fact, in a recent survey by Evans Data, over 50 percent of developers in the emerging markets of China, India, Eastern Europe, and Latin America use Microsoft's SQL Server, compared to 46 percent using MySQL.

Oracle database technology? It's used, but not nearly as extensively.

MySQL gives Oracle a club with which to beat Microsoft. It's not about open source. It's about the MySQL developer community and its competitive price point, two things that Microsoft also has going for it. Arguably, though, open source provides Oracle a strong competitive differentiator against Microsoft in these markets.

Even so, I think we'll eventually see open source aiding both sides in this battle, as Microsoft learns to drop its acrimonious stance toward open source and instead strategically embrace it, as IBM, Oracle, and others have done before it.

Oracle can't afford to abandon MySQL. It's the key to unlocking its ability to effectively compete with Microsoft in tomorrow's big markets.

Microsoft is launching an open-source foundation. Google is promising to keep user data portable. Both moves seem to cut against the financial self-interest of the two technology giants. Have the gods gone crazy, or are the business strategies of the industry's biggest players more subtle than "Embrace. Extend. Extinguish"?

With a steady adoption of open-source business and development strategies, Microsoft has gone from open-source hater to open-source embracer in just a couple of years:

• Created its own open-source foundation, the CodePlex Foundation.
• Launched CodePlex, an open-source project-hosting site.
• Started actively contributing to outside open-source projects, including those of the Apache Software Foundation, which it also financially supports.
• Embeds open-source code such as JQuery into its own products.
• Releases complementary open-source projects to augment its customer relationship management software, SharePoint, and other products.
• Received "unanimous approval" by the Open Source Initiative for a few open-source licenses.

This isn't to whitewash all that Microsoft has not done well vis-a-vis open source (e.g., I'm not a fan of its patent-licensing arrangements, including the "interoperability" agreement with Novell), but clearly, Microsoft has been actively adopting open source as part of its business strategy. I'll address the "Why?" question below.

Google, for its part, has long supported open-source software. And it's easy to see why: the company makes its money from data, not software. The more people that have access to a great Web experience through Firefox or Chrome, or have computer access through low-cost Chrome OS-based Netbooks, the better, as they'll almost inevitably find their way to data-rich services from Google.

Google, in other words, has a strong interest in promoting open source and closed data.

All of this makes Google's Data Liberation Front--"an engineering team at Google whose singular goal is to make it easier for users to move their data in and out of Google products--so intriguing. The DLF appears to be giving away Google's single best option for monetizing its user base.

What is Google thinking? One answer may be that Google is trying to head off government scrutiny and intervention. As CNET News' Tom Krazit posits, "anything Google can do to show that it isn't planning to create an impenetrable fortress surrounding user data, it's going to do."

That's one cynical and likely accurate view. But I think that there's more to the story.

Google has created an array of services that increasingly dominate their respective markets. Consumers and businesses are apparently very happy to give more of their time and attention to Google products.

As such, Google's primary concern revolves around keeping those users from leaving. While the DLF makes it easier for customers to leave Google, it also obviates the need to do so. So long as Google customers feel sure that they can leave on their own terms, they likely won't.

Microsoft is starting to learn the same thing. Its customers tend to use Microsoft products because they work, not because some evil genius in Redmond dreamed up diabolical ways to keep them locked in through closed file formats.

Don't believe me? Look at Microsoft's support for CMIS (Content Management Interoperability Services), a new content standard that promises to do for content management systems what SQL did for the database market. CMIS enables information portability between different content repositories. (Disclosure: Alfresco, my employer, was a founding member of CMIS, along with IBM, Microsoft, EMC, and others.)

In other words, CMIS makes it easy to move content out of SharePoint into, say, Documentum. It also enables application vendors to write to the CMIS standard, rather than specifically to SharePoint.

Microsoft has been actively engaged in drafting the CMIS specification and appears to be a strong proponent of it. Why? Why would Microsoft, which has much to gain from SharePoint being the center of a new lock-in strategy, support an open standard that makes it easy to move content out of SharePoint and into competing repositories?

Because Microsoft knows that it can win.

Take Microsoft's pre-CMIS partnership with Documentum. As CMS Watch anecdotally references, SharePoint is much easier to use than Documentum, making any partnership/integration between the two a largely one-way street from Documentum to SharePoint, just one reason that SharePoint has boomed, even as the economy has busted. This is only going to get better for Microsoft with CMIS interoperability.

Interoperability favors the vendor whose products are easier to use. By opening up, Microsoft is opening its doors to more customers and, hence, more money.

Google and Microsoft aren't supporting open source or open standards or open data because they grew up as Boy Scouts or Girls Scouts, and feel that it's the right thing to do.

Rather, they're increasingly engaged in open business strategies because they recognize the financial rewards that can stem from doing so. Openness is not a religion; it's a business strategy--a strategy that Microsoft and Google are learning to play too.

The business intelligence community has made much of its ability to transform the way enterprises operate, and even the way the world works. Open source takes this to the next level, as OStatic recently described. And yet, as exciting as open-source business intelligence is, it's not what gets me out of bed every morning before sunrise. What drove me out of bed to climb 2,474 feet on my mountain bike this morning is the personal intelligence movement or, more accurately, the personal data movement.

Tim O'Reilly talks eloquently about "data as the Intel Inside" of companies like Google, and he's right. But the data-driven businesses that are changing my life are applications on my iPhone that remind me to exercise, to avoid that second helping of chocolate mousse, and that help me manage my personal finances.

It used to be that the more ambitious among us managed our time and goals with a Franklin day planner. "Goal: Lose 20 pounds. Run five miles each day. Etc."

Today, with our iPhone strapped to our arm or thrown into our Camelback, we're still managing our goals but the data feedback is unforgiving, instantaneous, and deeply motivating. Lose It!, for example, is a phenomenal weight-loss tool. I've mostly been using it to maintain my preferred weight, but I've watched my good friend Bryce Roberts melt away 30-plus pounds while getting into the best biking shape he's ever been in.

Not that Runkeeper hasn't helped. Both Bryce and I use it to track our mountain bike rides. Using the iPhone's built-in GPS capabilities, Runkeeper tracks my rides, calling out to me each mile what my pace has been, motivating me to ride harder. As if that weren't motivation enough, I have Runkeeper set to automatically post my times and workouts to Twitter: I often refuse to rest simply because I know my Twitter friends are going to pillory me if they see a weak pace.

This ability to minutely track my exercise and diet regime so easily has literally changed my life, so much so that I've been exploring other areas that could be improved through data feedback and analysis.

One that I discovered over the weekend is Ego, which tracks Google Analytics statistics, Twitter follower counts, and more. I had already been tracking my statistics for this CNET blog on an hourly basis, for example, to see which posts were resonating and where, but Ego now gives me the ability to take that obsession on the road with me.

Given the recession, never before has it been more important that my wife and I manage to a budget. I've been a Wesabe user for a year or two now, and am just now starting to experiment with Wesabe on the iPhone. My wife, however, uses Mint, a similar service, which also is available on the iPhone.

I'm sure that such tools can be used to excess, but my experience thus far has been that they greatly improve the control I have over my life. These iPhone applications have helped me to track my progress against personal goals and, in so doing, have facilitated that progress.

Even as the Googles of the world get rich on the aggregation of our personal data, other companies like the makers of Runkeeper enriching our lives by making data personally useful and actionable. To make this happen, we simply needed mobile devices to be as powerful as they were ever-present with us.

Now that this has happened, there is no end to the possibilities our personal data affords us, especially as application providers find ways to allow us to mingle our data with others to drive enhanced value for both parties.

Follow me on Twitter @mjasay.

In a new study, Evans Data says that the developer population in established economies is expected to decline by 35 percent this year compared with last year, as InformationWeek reports. Despite this dearth of developers, however, we continue to see an explosion of open-source projects and social-Web applications.

What gives?

It's very possible, of course, that a dwindling number of developers is pushing more of its development work to the public eye of the Web, creating the appearance of more development activity even as the total number of lines of code written declines. Rising unemployment might be contributing to this.

In other words, perhaps that out-of-work Citigroup developer, who used to spend all of her time as one developer among many contributing to a big intranet application, has now launched an open-source project (or two) to ease the burden of unemployment?

Or perhaps the development tools made available for writing Facebook applications, for example, make it easier to crank out more projects by fewer people. Maybe productivity gains are enabling fewer developers to do more.

I'm not sure. But it does seem that the developer drought, spurred by a sickly economy, isn't having an adverse effect on open-source and social-Web development. If anything, the weak economy may be encouraging more development, not less.

How would you explain the increased number in open-source and social-Web applications, in light of a reported decreasing developer population?

UPDATE @ 11:51 PDT: As noted in the comments below, I inadvertently describe a 35-percent decrease in the developer population, rather than a 35-percent decrease in developer growth. That said, the same quandary/question remains: the pace of new development in open source and the social Web exceeds the growth of the developer population. Your thoughts on why?

Follow me on Twitter @mjasay.

The European Commission has a bold plan for improving software quality: make software developers liable for their code. The purported reason? Consumer peace of mind, according to the European Union commissioner of consumer affairs, Meglena Kuneva:

If we want consumers to shop around and exploit the potential of digital communications, then we need to give them confidence that their rights are guaranteed. That means putting in place and enforcing clear consumer rights that meet the high standards already existing in the main street. [The] internet has everything to offer consumers, but we need to build trust so that people can shop around with peace of mind.

Because, you know, the Internet has really struggled with consumers due to the poor quality of code. Google has a wide range of products in beta that really struggle to find users because who could possibly trust the beta version of Gmail, News, etc.?

What tripe.

I'm personally not against software liability, but have yet to discover a software vendor, open source or proprietary, that tries to evade responsibility for the quality of its products. In other words, I think this is a case of regulators seeking to justify their existence, not a plan for actually improving anyone's software experience.

On that note, the EC should be careful to avoid hurting the software industry, and minimizing its benefits, even as it seeks to help consumers of that industry by ensuring those benefits. For example, one of the reasons that software remains comparatively inexpensive is that the cost of legal liability is not baked into the purchase price. The EC's action could well result in pricing software beyond the reach of many current consumers and businesses.

Don't worry, some may claim, there's always open-source software! It's free and high quality!

Well, yes, but oddly enough, it also comes with absolutely no warranties, indemnification, etc., at least when used without commercial backing. It's a good thing, too: imagine releasing your software free-of-charge onto SourceForge.net, only to get hit with a lawsuit because some company's business was hurt because your software allegedly failed to work as expected. Talk about a raw deal.

On this point, Glyn Moody quotes security guru Bruce Schneier, who suggests that open source could get a free pass because open-source software is distributed without contracts. Open source, in other words, might be the ultimate get-out-of-EC-regulation-free card.

If this free pass works as advertised, presumably we'd see more software companies distributing software under open-source licenses, and only taking the blame for the proprietary add-ons/extensions that complement this open-source software. It's unclear how this would be helpful to the consumers the EC is straining to protect, but it's the stance I'd take if I were a vendor.

In this way, the EC's proposed changes to software liability could end up leaving businesses and consumers with less protection, not more, with open source providing a convenient escape hatch. Perhaps this is good as it means more software released under open-source licenses. But the idea of open source used as a means to evade legal liability doesn't sit well with me, and likely would ruin the positive connotations that currently attach to open source.

As noted, the Web seems to have thrived despite (or perhaps because of?) the lack of software-liability regulation. Open source, too, has fared exceptionally well, and has yielded significant benefits to companies and consumers...despite offering exactly zero software liability.

But this is the problem when bureaucrats, not common sense, rule. Subscription-based business models protect commercial customers, and open-data policies protect consumers, far better than any software-liability regime can. The freedom to change software vendors is a far better antidote to poor software quality than some EC bureaucrat.

In short, despite getting a lot of bad press lately, the market remains the best way to protect customers. If the EC would spend more time ensuring open markets, instead of trying to regulate closed markets, European consumers and businesses would find much better software protection.

Follow me on Twitter @mjasay.

Thursday I blogged that I'd like to see Google (or someone...Apple, Mozilla, someone else?) aggregate social Web applications so that I don't have to trip all over the Web checking what so-and-so is doing on Facebook, then sprinting back to LinkedIn to help someone else on a job search.

Judging from the comments, quite a few people disagree, to a great extent due to mistrust of Google with their data. I can appreciate that, though Google has expressed a desire to open up social-networking applications with open-data policies.

Regardless of promises, many mistrust Google because it's so darned big. This, as James Stewart reminds us in The Wall Street Journal, is not a problem in itself: there is nothing illegal and much to love in a natural monopoly.

Me? I don't have a problem with how big Google is. I just wonder if any of us work for anyone else anymore.

I find myself tweaking headlines and my initial paragraphs to accommodate Google News. As important as Digg, Slashdot, and other content aggregators can be, I find they drive less traffic than top placement on Google.

I'm not alone in this. The newspaper industry is up in arms about Google's power, yet is incapable of cutting Google off because so much of its traffic comes from Google, as CNET reports. Google's Marissa Mayer recently advised the newspaper industry on how to optimize its content for Google, which strikes some as galling given that Google may not be all that efficient at monetizing content.

And yet we cater to Google. We write news and blogs (and tweets and wiki updates and...) for Google. Even dead writers apparently write for Google. We write open-source software that Google consumes. We craft our Web sites to ensure they show well on Google.

Google started by offering a way to search the Web. It now effectively owns the Web because it's such an efficient way to make sense of the Web's noise. Lest we become riled up, Google is trying to make us feel better about its heft with a new charm offensive, as CNET reports.

But we don't really need Google to change. We need competitors to compete. We need Microsoft to start competing in earnest (Yikes! Did I say that??). Microsoft talks about being disruptive in search, but I've yet to see it. Let's hope it's not another tired retread of Google search as both Yahoo and Microsoft have tried before.

Or how about this for disruptive? Perhaps we need Mozilla to step into a role as the Web's primary platform, and really change the rules of the game for Google. For those interested in bludgeoning Google, perhaps there's a way to do that by contributing to Mozilla's Firefox project, and helping to steer it in a way that is beneficial for a non-Google patrolled and controlled Web?

Regardless, we don't need a crippled Google. Instead, we need serious competition. We also need to stop trying to look back to the past of content monetization and instead learn from Google, without necessarily capitulating to Google. Content creators need to change, even as Google's competitors need to change.

Google? It should just keep doing what it's doing.

Follow me on Twitter @mjasay.